Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/367

THE PRINCE the crystal current and the expensive picture, by just so much had his friendship charmingly made up to her from hour to hour for the penalties, as they might have been grossly called, of her mistake. Her mistake had only been, after all, in her wanting to seem to him straight; she had let herself in for being—as she had made haste, for that matter, during the very first half-hour at tea to proclaim herself—the sole and single frump of the party. The scale of everything was so different that all her minor values, her quainter graces, her little local authority, her humour and her wardrobe alike, for which it was enough elsewhere, among her bons amis, that they were hers, dear Fanny Assingham's—these matters and others would be all now as nought: five minutes had sufficed to give her the fatal pitch. In Cadogan Place she could always at the worst be picturesque—for she habitually spoke of herself as "local" to Sloane Street: whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible. And it all would have come, the disaster, from the real refinement in her of the spirit of friendship. To prove to him that she wasn't really watching him—ground for which would have been too terribly grave—she had followed him in his pursuit of pleasure: so she might, precisely, mark her detachment. This was handsome trouble for her to take—the Prince could see it all: it wasn't a shade of interference that a good-natured man would visit on her. So he didn't even say, when she told him how frumpy she knew herself, how frumpy her very maid, odiously going back on her, rubbed it into her, night and morning, with unsealed eyes and lips, that she 337